Pacific Mythender

It seems like everyone is getting all “OMG PACIFIC RIM LET ME SHOW YOU HOW I CAN HACK MY GAME FOR IT,” and why should I be left out of that fun? ;)

(I’ve giving myself just 15 minutes to write this, totally stream-of-consciousness. After that, I hand the ball to you guys. I have work to do on the actual book.)

Making a Pacific Rim build of Mythender isn’t as simple as it sounds. You’ve got to redefine both the Weapons and the whole corruption system.

First, a weird concept: every two characters pilots one Jaeger. So, pair off and come up with your Jaeger’s concept.

Next, Weapons. Having “my skill at piloting my Jaeger” is boring. Also “my Jaeger, Gipsy Danger” is boring, because it’s assumed. So let’s fuck with it.

Intrinsic Weapons become Drift Weapons: emotions or moments that will fire you up in battle. Relic Weapons become Jaeger Weapons — notable elements of your Jaeger that make it different from others. And let’s use the Companion Weapon rules for Drift Weapons, where they charge when you’re Wounded.

Alright, so we have those two types of Weapons, right? Here’s where it’ll get funky. Every two players shares one Jaeger. You each come up with a Drift Weapon of your own, and one of the Jaeger Weapons. Then you write them on the Jaeger playsheet–and in play, each of you has access to all the Weapons, even the other person’s Drift Weapon! That represents the sharing of minds

We should also raise the Wound cost to 4, for reasons I won’t get into right now.

Now, for Corruption. Mythender’s core mechanic has to involve a corrupting element. In this case, we’ll divert a touch from Pacific Rim’s canon and say that the biggest issue drift-pilots face is insanity, which comes from sharing minds in stressful moments. (This necessitates redefining how Legendary, Mythic, and Titanic actions are framed.)

But as you drift further down the rabbit hole, the Jaeger becomes easier to use — translating into Gifts (which I’ll now call Advanced Systems). This can also cause the Jaeger to change in Form.

Crap, my 15 minutes are up. Where would you go from here? What would you do differently?

The two-per Jaeger problem could be solved using something like the Better Angels demons: you play two characters, one is your primary, the other is the copilot for another primary (to avoid proliferation of characters.) I haven’t seen the movie yet, so I don’t know if I am off base on the concept.

I’m going to give myself a timer as well because I have a rare window of time this morning.

What makes this really interesting to me is the Mythenders-as-Pilots idea. I think there are several paths of corruption here: Mental Corruption (what Ryan mentioned above via Insanity & the Drift), and Physical Corruption (via radiation, exposure to Kaiju, etc.)

There’s maybe also room to include Scientist as another kind of Mythender, but you would have to fork the game to allow for Science-enders as well.

Blights could be fallen Kaiju (and what that means for the general populace), or you can diverge and have blights become Rift effects (steps up the category of the next Kaiju, number of Kaiju, time before next attack)